I mean we can go back to posting about how nothing is real again and the hidden violence of financial capitalism and the blood on everyone's hands and the neoliberal project of abstraction from the Hegelian force monopoly while there are riots in every city because a cop straight up shot a kid and all of our economic power was built on slavery, and still kind of is except we're just getting better at hiding it through bureaucracy and securitizations and status checkers (except we don't even try to hide the open wounds at this point, we just feel lucky to have jobs because millennial Stockholm Syndrome and also we let the commons rot).

Or we can discuss how the first "interdisciplinary" "elite" law school to take incommensurability/integrity from Dworkin to just all out Mille Plateaux and also be cheap AF probably wins in a strategic marketplace of ideas political economy paradigm where money is people too and why. It's whatever to me really, and actually kind of all pretty much the same thing if you think about it. I don't mean this in a nihilistic way. Firefighters have to tear through walls too.

The inhabitants of Castalia spend their days and nights fully absorbed in the task of refining ever-more sophisticated strategies for succeeding in the Glass Bead Game, a strikingly esoteric and beautiful contest in which competitors strive to outdo each other by juxtaposing aesthetically evocative cultural fragments, such as couplets of poetry, philosophical axioms, or musical notes. Yet as the game becomes more specialized and cut off from wider conversations, Hesse tells the story about how things begin to change:

“If the cultural level of Castalia were compared with that of the country at large, it became apparent that the two were by no means approaching each other; rather, they were moving apart in a deeply troubling way. The more cultivated, specialized, overbred that Castalian intellectuality became, the more the world inclined to let the Province be and to regard it not as a necessity, as daily bread, but as a foreign body, something to be a little proud of, like a precious antique which for the time being the owners would not like to give up or give away, but which they would happily keep stored in the attic”

"When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment, "ordinary life" may prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own spatial domain."

Moments later, Debord elaborates on the important goals of unitary urbanism in contemporary society:“The atmosphere of a few places gave us a few intimations of the future powers of an architecture that it would be necessary to create in order to provide the setting for less mediocre games.”

Quoting Karl Marx, Debord says:“People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty.”

It's kind of a moral truism that the more privilege you have, the more responsibility you have. It's elementary in every domain: you have privilege; you have opportunities; you have choices: you have responsibilities. In the rich, powerful societies, privileged people like us - we're all privileged people - we have the responsibility to take the lead in trying to prevent the disasters that our own social institutions are creating. It's outrageous to demand or even observe the poorest, most repressed people in the world taking the lead in trying to save the human species and in fact innumerable other species from destruction. So we should join them.

For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.

That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.

There have long been games where you won by having new ideas. In the third century BC Archimedes won by doing that. At least until an invading Roman army killed him. Which illustrates why this change is happening: for new ideas to matter, you need a certain degree of civil order. And not just not being at war. You also need to prevent the sort of economic violence that nineteenth century magnates practiced against one another and communist countries practiced against their citizens. People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.

That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with them. When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success.

Like I said, I'm way more "you didn't build that," and lol at "stolen" when value is converted to USD and cops protect your shit, but

e: Also, not feeding and housing people is definitely economic violence. So is subpar healthcare. Maybe underfunding education is too

"We want to build the AirBnB of school lunches" *pivots* "It's like Instagram but just for pictures of food"Actually I think a good Instagram strat would be to just comment childhood hunger stats on pictures of food

Actually, thinking about it a little more, I don't have any problem saying lack of access to education - or for that matter, massive student debt - constitutes constructive violence. Stress can fuck a person's body up pretty badly.

"When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment, "ordinary life" may prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own spatial domain."

Moments later, Debord elaborates on the important goals of unitary urbanism in contemporary society:“The atmosphere of a few places gave us a few intimations of the future powers of an architecture that it would be necessary to create in order to provide the setting for less mediocre games.”

Quoting Karl Marx, Debord says:“People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty.”

slackademic wrote:Okay so what's the casual marxist's guide to doing it big in law school? I'm still unfamiliar with "the agon" but I'm curious about your conception of someone fighting/making noise while they're here.

I really do want to put some thought into a general guide but it seems so situation-specific - it would start with learning the terrain.

Really about to step in it with Smaug here but YOLO

Nietzsche wrote:That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.

There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

Businesslady wrote:Despite an appearance of common functional aims, each school seems in actuality a network of unique people, structures, ideologies

I think they're all pretty much part of the same machine, though. Whatever academic differences there are in faculties/faculty research, that has virtually no effect on student experience. All the schools are set up the same way and value the same things with regard to educating students.

Businesslady wrote:Despite an appearance of common functional aims, each school seems in actuality a network of unique people, structures, ideologies

I think they're all pretty much part of the same machine, though. Whatever academic differences there are in faculties/faculty research, that has virtually no effect on student experience. All the schools are set up the same way and value the same things with regard to educating students.

Is this entirely true? Does it have to stay true? What role does the "conventional wisdom" *on this website* play?

I'm not so sure, but I think students - especially the ones that tend to say "fuck this" and can be of massive value in a rankings war as well as, you know, like, desirable within an academic community - are worth selling on differentiable experiences. I don't know how the accounting is done, but speaking probably overgenerally, the job-farm + expenditures-per-student model seems to create a way-high sticker price, a weird jockeying of opaque scholarship negotiations based more in competition than anything like "merit" (not that "numbers" should be a proxy in the first place or by extension that opacity in *qualitative* evaluation is avoidable or even totally undesirable, but like), a crisis of choice for the applicant who doesn't have the proper experience to think about optionality, and inevitable and inefficient clumsy price discrimination attempts. Running spreadsheets, negotiating based on competitive offers (not that this doesn't have its own merits in some ways, but like), making loan repayment a lottery in a scarce public interest "jobs" world, and all in all sticking people with debt levels that weaken their employment bargaining position considerably (not that this doesn't help develop a certain, um, perspective, but like) does not seem to me to be building a future legal community responsibly institution-side.

Paul Graham, 2014 wrote:That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.

There have long been games where you won by having new ideas. In the third century BC Archimedes won by doing that. At least until an invading Roman army killed him. Which illustrates why this change is happening: for new ideas to matter, you need a certain degree of civil order. And not just not being at war. You also need to prevent the sort of economic violence that nineteenth century magnates practiced against one another and communist countries practiced against their citizens. People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.

That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with them. When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success.

Deleuze & Guattari, 1980 wrote:Whereas the theorem belongs to the rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. Despite what Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an “obstacle”; it is the surpassing of the obstacle, a projection, in other words, a war machine. All of this movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of the “problem-element” and subordinates it to the “theorem-element.”

This Archimedean science, or this conception of science, is bound up in an essential way with the war machine: iheproblemataaie the war machine itself and are inseparable from inclined planes, passages to the limit, vortices, and projections. It would seem that the war machine is projected into an abstract knowledge formally different from the one that doubles the State apparatus. It would seem that a whole nomad science develops eccentrically, one that is very different from the royal or imperial sciences. Furthermore, this nomad science is continually “barred,” inhibited or banned by the demands and conditions of State science. Archimedes, vanquished by the Roman State, becomes a symbol. The fact is that the two kinds of science have different modes of formalization, and State science continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad science. State science retains of nomad science only what it can appropriate; it turns the rest into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it. It is as if the “savants” of nomad science were caught between a rock and a hard place, between the war machine that nourishes and inspires them and the State that imposes upon them an order of reasons. The figure of the engineer (in particular the military engineer), with all its ambivalence, is illustrative of this situation. Most significant are perhaps borderline phenomena in which nomad science exerts pressure on State science, and, conversely, State science appropriates and transforms the elements of nomad science.

Businesslady wrote:I read that recent Brian Leiter paper on the public intellectual and I think the way he conceives of a lawyer as a discourse-sanitizer is kind of an incomplete and maybe problematically Nietzchean epistemology (lol is that even right?). I wouldn't know. I took one non-required philosophy course in undergrad. It was the analytics. I liked Critique of Pure Reason OK but I kind of half-assed it. I'm feral as hell.

this surprised me a bit. well you certainly are or at least appear to be one of the most well-read non-institutionally educated persons I've come across on what we might term academic "philosophy". Although much of the reading you refer to might be more (or less? depending on optic) appropriately slotted as sociology/social anthropology, so certainly not quite a good will hunting scenario.

and who didn't half ass critique of pure reason. it's barely readable. Hegel's Reason in History was far more accessible/lucid.

ETA: also reading through 15 pgs of this was time far better spent than outlining tax.. I hope.

Paul Graham wrote:she has always been struck both by how consistently successful startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as startup founders.

Why? I think there are several reasons. One is that being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems. Which is particularly painful to someone who cares how their brain is used: your brain goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels.

True enough, and I have always agreed that "harmony is strength." Fighting is a big and usually avoidable distraction for individuals. And "meanness" is driven by petty avarice and baseness, the lowest parts of the human heart. Meanness creates division. But it's interesting to think about whether this is true for groups as well. Does a society whose political system is built around recurring, organized "the ends justify the means" style conflicts cultivate meanness? Are not some elections in America a cabal of disingenuous personal attacks, falsehoods, greed, and posturing -- and does seeing these things from our "leaders" naturally encourage others to also be base? Or do the tenor of our elections merely reflect the baseness of the electorate, an inevitable consequence of a society in decline?

Unfortunately, I think it's tough for the Government to discourage baseness and elevate integrity in a way that is not self-defeatingly coercive. Maybe they can effect LT change through the public education system and selecting the curriculum w/ that in mind.

And yes, not providing access to education, food, and housing is definitely economic violence.

It's hard not to want to read a malevolent rentier class deliberate artificial scarcity thing into it, but outside of extreme neofeudal caricatures like Koch brothers (or shit, sub in Soros and reflexivity if you want to make this a universally palatable narrative of macro-fuckery conspiracy, but I think one has to admit at least he's empathetic) it's probably not productive. I want to give humanity the benefit of the doubt, even the portion of humanity turning McMansions into barracks and feeding on FUD, and for that matter, the portion having non-JDs run spreadsheets competitively to ration out access to legal education and credentials.

Also ironically, if you're trying to parse out cause / effect in telling simple stories about complex interactions of sociology and political economy, I think Soros on reflexivity is probably about as good as you're going to get. How it's best discussed - in terms of 1) information entropy and market failure, 2) the futility of deliberation without expertise, or 3) perverse incentives rewarding for-profit wealth-destroying adversarial proceedings - probably depends on the context. This is a top law school application messageboard so I'm hitting all 3 kind of hard from the perspective of applying to top law schools.

So, yeah, on some level it's true you can't get to two Cambridges in a world (or, re:law, a fundamentally unscientific discipline) where down-in-the-weeds textdumping, citewhoring, and forcing a human cognitive stack overflow is how you "win" (see also bk1 on analogizing to "why do businesses go quarter-to-quarter"). So yeah, our "right" talks about "Keynesians," as interchangeable with "socialists," versus the "free market" (not only after going on 50 years of post-Friedman economics, but after fucking 2008), and our "left" wants to not do math, babysit people on welfare, and make sure they don't spend money on heroin. But if it's asking the world of *professional policymakers* to recognize what *having computers* means for the Lerner/Hayek mass parallel computation discussion then I think that's probably where to focus in a nominally representative democracy.

The thing about democracy is that when a big and counterproductive segment of quasi-intellectual contemporary America won't grow up and concentrated capital eats up the media bandwidth, you wind up in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent world. That kind of allows you to identify vectors of "meanness" in the way you describe. On the most macro level there's a populist conservative movement that seems to have the Holy Roman Empire as its ideal of statecraft dictating the agenda of the legislative branch. There's a judicial majority with Scalia - you know, the guy who claims the legislature needs to be running the ball because they're totally willing and totally representative of the public interest and also it's basically 1789 right now - as its ideological anchor.

Reading about Obama as a law review editor is pretty interesting. Like even taking a cue from the Cato institute (lol):

I'll skip all the obvious synthesis and just conclude that despite my redistributionist, you-didn't-build-that-and-everything-is-stolen saber rattling, I think Sunstein's "paternalistic libertarianism" and Lessig's intellectually honest FedSoc member meets the real world approach is probably the most compelling bite-size transpartisan framework for now. The irony is that it seems radical. Like, the palatability of my casual Marxism is one thing. OTOH it seems *really difficult* from a realist perspective - or even corporate management / shareholder rights perspective if someone needs that level of handholding - to think of America as a C-suite issue. It's more of a shitty proxy voting situation, right? I think you have to talk about capital concentration and ineffective allocation here. Why do businesses think quarter to quarter? Because Dan Loeb thinks Sotheby's should be fucking Big Lots.

Anyway, I know it's kind of shitty for me to talk about politics after being all "not a politics thread!" but I really only mean to analogize and try to ID where it might be useful to see systemic/procedural meanness and where to see individual/substantive malevolence, and probably most importantly, where they overlap. The law school model of the capitalist slaughterhouse conveyor belt is a trailing microcosm of the broader shitshow that needs to be examined in terms of both systems and collections of individual agents. The depressing irony is that "elite" legal education, as opposed to vocational training that you could get through MOOCs, clinics, and entry-level associate experience, should probably be the exact opposite of what people here seem to demand - an agon comprising in significant part a creative vanguard of people who want to be there for civic reasons. Again, respect to hard-won jobs numbers transparency, but I still think it's just a first step and I don't think it's asking too much for applicants to let institutions know they want more than percentage chances at grueling jobs that pay well enough to service debt, but a coherent articulation of a future.

And again, to make this palatable to a conservative mindset - that's a future that might look like a romanticized past.

FedSoc and NLG should joint protest to drive 1800+ hour firms off campuses

Businesslady wrote:What a debasement of the profession (as well as every other "job" in capitalist society by the way) it is not to be able to demand more and say fuck you without risking homelessness, starvation, and lack of access to medicine. Is it ransacking corporatism and neofeudalism that killed the old dream? Is this "the market at work?" Should people who feel like they deserve more for their intellectual curiosity think of numbers-gaming Peter Principle strivers as basically bootlicking scabs? Or does the fact that this career path was traditionally a handout to rich white dudes from "good families" invalidate the position that people getting in this position on a more nominally meritocratic basis should be demanding the same? I think everyone deserves more for their time - the old guard, like Keynes, never "had" to work, but they also never subjected themselves to the indignities that people today made to feel grateful for the opportunity to work suicidal hours do.

A Harvard Law School graduate could expect in 1960 to bill fifteen hundred hours a year at a major big-city law firm. In return, he was virtually certain to make partner in six years, share in the firm's profits, and enjoy a collegial, relaxed, lifetime position of prestige. His desk and office would be kept for him until he died, sometimes for years after, as a show of respect.

Today's Harvard Law School graduate can expect to bill twenty-two hundred hours a year, and often as many as twenty-four hundred. In return, he stands perhaps a one-in-eight chance at making partner after eight years, and even then he might not share profits. As a partner, he will never be allowed to relax; if his revenues or hours drop, he will be invited to resign. When a Harvard Law School graduate fails to make partner, he is seen as the worst kind of failure by colleagues and prospective employers, because he entered with staggering advantages and promise. If he does make it to partner, then to retirement, no one will think to keep his desk around.

"Young Harvard lawyers are less content today than we were. They work harder, longer hours. They don't have the time to indulge themselves, to become Renaissance people. My classmates still believed that it was possible to go to plays--every night if we wished--to learn music, to have intellectual discourses. We led pretty decent lives in the law firms. Today, a Harvard Law graduate comes in conditioned to give up large parts of his life for a number of years. I don't know if it's a pretty decent life."

From the few pages I read, I'd give you a B for effort. This stuff certainly isn't funny, but there's a lot of justice in the contempt for strivers, and rentiers and such. It's really too dense to be effective propaganda, which makes it seem more like you guys are just jerking each other off.

The problem is, everyone in the "legal system" (for lack of a better word) has a good sense of the way things really are, what the stakes are, what their values are (basically non existent). They also understand that their survival depends on not publicly challenging any of the fundamental values/goals/financial structures/social relationships that undergird the legal world. They may not speak about it in your terms or with your political frame work you provide but people get it instinctively.

But still, people have the hope that they can win the game of musical chairs. It's an economic and ego survival strategy. References to Eichmann are apt. His defense at Nuremberg was something like "if I didn't provide logistical and transportation support, someone else would have." In other words, if I didn't play along, someone else would have, then where would I be? Pay no attention to the evil done along the way....

The bottom line is, words are useless. What's really necessary is a change in people's circumstances. No one is going to work for a change until all the easy paths are exterminated and it's fight for a new world or die. People have to reach the point where, when you aint got nothing, you aint got nothing lose. That's the essence of "workers of the world unite, there's nothing left to lose but your chains."